Tuesday, January 27, 2004

At 2:15pm today the Dean campaign sent email to their list of NHvoters asking them to get out the vote.

Additionally there was this information:

-----

Dean for America has received reports that Dean supporters arereceiving "robo-calls" telling them incorrect and misleading pollingplace information.

If you receive such a call, please call Paul Twomey at the Manchesterheadquarters at 603-491-2966. If you have a recording of therobo-call on your answering machine, please let us know as soon aspossible.

You can also have the call traced via the following steps:

1. Immediately after receiving the call, hang up then lift the receiver and listen for a dial tone.

2. Press *57 (or if you have a rotary phone dial 1157).

3. An announcement will tell you the call was traced and give you further instructions.

4. You will not receive the number from Verizon. The results of a successful trace will only be provided to the police or other legal authorities.

On the way to drop the girls off at the YMCA, I stopped in and voted.For a grand total of 5 minutes I was a registered Democrat. With theDemocratic ballot, the clerk handed me a 'change of party affiliation'form to change back to undeclared after voting.

On the way out there were two organizations taking polls. More likeoffering them, since the people running them were just standing thereand we had to ask to take the survey. One was from the LA Times andhad a middle/left of center slant and had a number of 'pick 3 of 12'of most important issues. The other was by CNN/Fox/etc which came intwo versions, both were definitely right of center. On Wendy's theyasked if the "Dean Scream" had any impact on voting. Mine asked a if'electablity' was a factor. Outside the school, there were two Deanpeople asking if they their campaign had ever contacted us and if soasked to remove us from their list. Clearly they are going to becalling everyone on their list who hasn't yet voted.

We got there about 20 after and Wendy and Trevor stood by thegymnasium handing out the remaining campaign literature we had at home-- it will be useless after Tuesday. I headed into with the rest ofthe kids and found some seats on the side in the middle. While wewaited a CNNreporter was making therounds taking notes. She was interested to know if I had decided(yes, for Edwards), weregoing to vote (of course), and when decided. I told her that we sayKerry a few weeks ago and hesaid to vote for him and not vote to send a message. Wendy and Iseriously talked about it quite a bit and decidednow was the time to vote for who we wanted and not just who maybeat Bush. The reporter alsowas curious if there was anything that turned us off of href="http://www.johnkerry.com">Kerry or href="http://www.deanforamerica.com">Dean. It isn't really a caseof don't like but like better. I explictly told her that the DeanScream had no impact and made us see him as more human and passionate.

After that one of the Edwards advance team asked if the kids and Iwould like to stand on stage. Sure! Later Wendy and Trevor (withcrutches) found us and came up to. They were trying to get a varietyof people up there -- a number of folksfrom NH, but also people that came just to support Edwards. Ifyou see the streaming video (href="rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04012504_edwards.rm">rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04012504_edwards.rm) you seemost of the family about from about 41 minutes in through the end. Weare on the right side of the stage and you'll see href="http://www.nozell.com/griffin">Griffin getting Edwards tosign the girl's "Go, John, Go!" signs. Past meetings were pretty lowkey -- just a local Democrat doing the introduction, but now they havea staffer to warm up the crowd ("Who is from NJ? Who is from NC?""Have you heard this song E-D-W-A-R-D-S sometime, something, now yousing", etc) before the introduction. There were a fair number ofpeople (25%?) from out of state.

The actual speech was pretty similar to his standard stump speecheswe've heard before. There seems to be more emphasis on "Two Americas-- one for Bush and his special interests and one for the rest of us".He also took a few questions from the crowd which were again the usualhealthcare, job/economy, etc. Also new was directly asking forsupport and getting the vote out. As usual he introduced Elizabeth,his wife, but his college senior daughter and Glenn Close who werealso on stage.

The gymnasium was packed and a few hundred people in an overflow room.On the way out we saw the MTV Rock the Vote people and someonegathering 'Repeal the PATRIOT act' signature which I signed. It wasaround 1:30pm by time we got out of there and rewarded the kids' goodbehavior with a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/">delicious lunch atMcDonalds.

John Edwards in Nashua, NH Fairgrounds Junior High School (25 Jan 2004)

href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/stories/storyReader$712">Hereis another view of the same event, href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/">j apparently isn'tsomeone who arrives early enough for these things...

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Last night while the boys were at a YMCA swim team lockin, Wendy, thegirls and I went to the John Edwards event at the local bowling alley.He was scheduled to bowl a few frames at 8:30pm, but by 8:00 the placewas mobbed. Before he got there there started to be frequent, andincreasingly stressed out announcements from bowling alley manager --don't stand on the fountain, stay off the bowling area with streetshoes, move your car if it is in a firelane, move your triple parkedcars it will be towed to finally she was going to call the police andfire marshal if people didn't start to leave. All this before JohnEdwards showed up. She would have done better to cancel the leaguegames and just kept the food and beer flowing.

The girls had colored some homemade 'Go, John, Go!' signs and were intheir pretty dresses, but the spent most of the time on our shoulders.We ran into a video crew from Germany and a photographer fromSwitzerland. There were a few college boys from Union College fromoutside Albany who were up for the weekend and another college girlfrom NYC said there were about 150 from her school up helping withcampaigns (didn't catch which college or if they were only forEdwards.)

On the way out I chatted up a reporter from the Boston Globe about howthe media seems to be covering NH as a Kerry/Dean horse race with noreal coverage of Edwards or Lieberman and just a little of Clark.With Edwards surprise 2nd place showing in Iowa and Liebermans make orbreak in NH I'd think there should be more coverage of that.

Edwards was late from attending the Democratic dinner down in Nashuaand came in and gave a 10 minute standad stump speech. Mentioned thathe isn't here to take swipes at other democratic candiates andintroduced Glenn Close who has endorced him (see the photo below).

AP News on Netscape.com has to say of the the event:

Hundreds of people who came to see Democraticpresidential hopeful U.S. Sen., John Edwards at a bowling alley inMerrimack, N.H. Saturday Jan., 24, 2004 were told to evacuate thebuilding and sent out into the cold. Edwrads(sic) spole(sic) for aboutten minutes to the crowd inside before police told them they had toevacuate. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

Friday, January 23, 2004

I've been hacking on a perl script that will 1) get the list of sharedopmls from feeds.scripting 2) put it in a table using a sqlitedatabase 3) iterate over all of them and grab the users blogroll andalso put them in an sql table.

Unfortunately when I turn it loose on all 600+ users, it dies on the 20th one or so with a strange message about trying to modify a readonly variable. The line is in an XML::Parser callback and lookspretty innocuous:

my ($j1, $feedname, $j2, $type, $j3, $xmlurl) = @_;

I then tried iterating from the 'bottom' of the list of users (SELECTuserid, person, url FROM users ORDER BY userid DESC) and that cranksthrough a few hundred users and then dies deep in the guts ofXML::Parser complaining about invalid string or other.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

We got *two* calls this evening from pollsters asking about my viewson the primary. I don't recall who the first one was from, but saidto be non-partisan and the other from NH's href="http://www.fpc.edu">Franklin Pierce college and will berunning all week.

The Kerry campaign also called inviting me (or whoever answered) to anevent Friday night. It was one of those automated calls -- Press 1 ifyou will be attending, press 2 if you are not, press 3 if you can notat this time....

BUGS If you find some, send them to marc@nozell.com and maybe I'll look at it. Maybe.

LICENSE This work is hereby released into the Public Domain. To view a copy of the public domain dedication, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.=====

Monday, January 19, 2004

Wendy and I were up in Manchester today and stopped in to pick up someyard signs, video/DVDs, etc. The noon-time tracking polls had Edwardsin 3rd in Iowa and Sarah and company were getting ready for a whileride starting tomorrow. There was a camera crew there getting somebackground videos of the staffs too. I don't think were where in anyof the shots (didn't want to) but if you see a bright yellow Colombiawinter jacket, that is Wendy.

It is 9:45 and CNN is predicting 38% Kerry, 32% Edwards and Dean adistant 18%!

If Edwards does well in New Hampshire next week, she may be going downto Boston for the DNC nominating convention and she will be unbearableto live with ;-) ;-) ;-)

Friday, January 16, 2004

I replied to the unsolicited email offer pointing to my blog and got aquick reply at 17:18 from "Elie D. Ashery", the President & CEO,with the warning at the end of the email:=====This email is considered original works and cannot be published in whole orin part without the express written consent of Gold Lasso, Inc.=====

So my interpretation of what he had to say.

-> Sends his sincere apologies for any inconvience and will investigate how my email got on one of their marketing lists. I appreciate that and am actually interested to see what he finds out.

-> Stated that Gold Lasso complies with the 'CANN SPAM Act legislation' and respects out-opt. That too is nice to see. Personally I'd prefer opt-in to these and other marketing mailing lists.

-> Unfortunately it ends on a sour note when he warns me that he takes 'serious offense for insinuating' that they engage in unethical business practices. He considers my statements libel will take legal action if what I write prevents him from doing his business.

I've since clicked on the link in the original email to have my emailaddress removed and presume I will never receive email from theirmarketing lists.

************************************** Email Marketing for Restaurants ************************************** E-mail marketing is taking the restaurant industry by storm. You no longer have to spend a hefty fee on a cable TV spot or coupon booklets. With Gold Lasso?s Restaurant Marketing Program, you can identify your best customers, efficiently communicate with them, and reward their loyalty. You can even ask for referrals. All via e-mail!

- No technology to buy - No computers or software to setup - No data to enter

Gold Lasso is a full-service e-mail marketing firm that can help you get customers in the door and keep them coming back. You have real-time access to your Gold Lasso account via our Web site so you know immediately which promotions are working and which are not. Don?t wait! Contact us now to find out how we can help promote your restaurant via e-mail.

This document describes the concepts and steps necessary to configureand boot Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES version 3 on a diskless HPProLiant BL20p G2 server blade using iSCSI to connect across theTCP/IP network to an HP StorageWorks SR2122 iSCSI Storage Router.These concepts and methodologies can be successfully applied tosimilar scenarios.

Basically it describes how to use the UNH iSCSI stack to build acustom initrd that when downloaded via PXE will bring up the IPnetwork and then mount the root filesystem on an iSCSI served disk.Pretty cool if you ask me, but I'm biased...

I was reading 'The 1590Broadcaster', the local free newspaper in town and found href="http://www.1590.com/Stories/0,1413,222~23677~1892822,00.html">this article about little known Republican and Democratic Partycandidates.

Sunday, January 11, 2004

I've been messing around with Dave Winer's new href="http://feeds.scripting.com">OPML sharing site and adding abunch of feeds to href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk">Amphetadesk/AmphetaOutline.For some reason it isn't showing a bunch of sites as having new news(come on, nothing from fark.com in 3hours!?)

This evening on got some email from the author of href="http://liferea.sourceforge.net">liferea who said he hadfixed a problem with the HTTP headers of my server and recommendedtrying out the version (0.4.7) from CVS. It works! Thanks Lars!

So, I'm going to switch for a week to liferea exclusively and see howthat goes.

One thing that I'm going to miss is one click to add a feed from href="http://feeds.scripting.com">feeds.scripting.com to myaggregator. I don't see how liferea could insinuate itself into themix.

Wednesday, January 7, 2004

Man a long event! We got there at 7 and left around 9:30! The kidswere well behaved but tired. I have scratched notes on my palm pilot,but translation to english and blogging it will have to wait untiltomorrow.

Highlights:

* very good, but non-Atkins, chili* Mostly middle age, middle/upper middle class income crowd* warmed up the crowd with a couple of jokes* rude female heckler interruped a few times (education, taxes, whydid you Kerry & Sheehen do more when in office) who left early* mostly well rounded stump speech, number of promises if elected,executive orders, fair tax code, health care for all, military,jobs, jobs, jobs, oil dependancy -> fund hydrogenresearch/development, etc.* NH Voters for me because only I can beat Bush, don't use your voteto 'make a point'* our 12 yr old had the last question "What makes you different fromall the other candidates?" (a surprise to my wife and I who didn'tprompt him)* afterwards chatted up Kerry's literal coat holder about Bush'simmigration policy announcement (Kerry didn't mention it) and thatour particular issues were public education/special education andcivil liberties. He also dragged Kerry over for a picture with thefamily.

On the way home Wendy and I talked about whether 'voting to make apoint' is the right thing to do to have someone beat Bush, so I guessKerry did his job.

Thursday, January 1, 2004

Tonight I've been playing around with various GNU/Linux-based RSSclients.

* liferea v0.4.5 C-based, gnome interface, Three paned interface, read in either the pane or click to load in a browser. Over all pretty nice but occasional hangs and some RSS that validate aren't recognised (like mine). If would be helpful to give a clue why it wasn't accepted. It doesn't import my amphetadesk opml file.* rssowl v0.63b Java-based with SWT graphics libraries so it looks more like a modern GUI, three paned interface. No way to import opml files at the moment, it is only alpha quality release, so that is understandable. It comes with a nice list of RSS feeds. This app does parse my RSS feed, but displayes the HTML markup in the reading area.* syndigator v0.12 perl-based with GTK/Gnome style interface. Imported my amphetadesk opml and parsed my RSS feed. Like rssowl, sometimes it displays HTML in the text. Hmm, perhaps it is blosxom's RSS output that needs looking at. It still seems a bit young in in the GUI -- the keyboard access is a bit lacking and while updating feeds is laggy.

There best of the crop so far is liferea, but I may stick with theweb-based/perl amphetadesk (withamphetaoutline theme) for a while longer. Anyone have somesuggestions?